West Wind Review - 2010

“Let me tangle” (from “Noli Me,” a long poem by Nathan Austin) would be a great tagline for West Wind Review. This “poetry and fiction anthology” from Southern Oregon University, is one wild tangle of words. Rather than worry about what it all means, I just got into the spirit of the endeavor, two hundred pages of tangles and tangents.

There is the political commentary tangle (“Trans-Fats Ambush Party” by Lance Newman):

Mr. Marriage, search the House Zone For centrist menus now that conservative Acids attack the expensive white base.

Mrs. Kelvin’s first audience online has begun to insist each video be filmed on a different couch or continent in a new age. Last spring she recorded a video of her recent works, the long, digital yarn a lot like those printed chronicles, her fictions: Stew and Heidi return.

And the surreal syntax with funky punctuation tangle (“tendency” by Michael Farrell, whose last line concludes with a comma):

having breakfast one motoyama or surry hills winter. made sexy your friends celebrities its better than Russian prison than hunting a gun & jacket through new guinea.

congrats they punch while the second son gets

These tangles, and several prose entanglements, are accompanied by some graphic poem tangles, including Donato Mancini’s “If You Think Helen Keller Using the Satanic Salute to Mean I Love You Is Just A Coincidence, then You Are Truly Gullible,” wing-ding or ding-bat like graphics which end in a series of crosses.

Judith Goldman’s tangle (poem) “Good for it” ends with the single line “I have shrove to the same scale.” After reading West Wind Review, I can safely say, me, too! [westwindreview.blogspot.com/]